Marble Madness-style game shows off the power of HTML5.

Web-based games tend to have a bad reputation, often for good reasons. For years they've been primarily characterized by bulky, inefficient plugins, dated 2D graphics, and basic gameplay. But Google's latest Chrome-based experiment shows that HTML5 gaming has advanced quite a bit past that stereotype.

At its core, World Wide Maze is a pretty basic ball-rolling game in the style of Marble Madness or Super Monkey Ball, with 3D levels that are built dynamically using the HTML elements from any webpage you care to use as a template. But there are a few things that make it interesting.

The first is a link to the mobile version of Chrome that turns your smartphone into a PC game controller. By syncing the two browsers or entering a code, players are able to move the ball on their PC by tilting or tapping on their mobile phones, which show a continuously updated overhead map of the action that brings to mind the Wii U GamePad or Microsoft's Smartglass Xbox controls. There's a decent bit of input lag when using this method and the tilt sensitivity is a bit loose, but just being able to use a mobile phone to control a Web-based game in this way creates a pretty intense "wow, that's neat" moment.

The second notable bit is just how advanced a purely HTML5 game can be these days. World Wide Maze works off the WebGL standard, and it requires pretty decent system specs for a browser game, including 1GB of RAM and a 256MB graphics card for hardware acceleration. If you have that kind of power, you'll see the kind of graphics that just a few years ago probably would have required some sort of clunky proprietary plug-in or a native, downloaded app. If this is the future of gaming based on open HTML standards, sign us up.

I can't get the tilting controls to work on my Droid Bionic...the jump button works but not the tilting. Ah well kinda cool. Tried it on one of my web sites and works pretty cool since there are a lot of <div> tags....wonder how marketing would like this...

It's decades behind Flash or Silverlight. Not to mention platform incompatibilities. But it somehow still constitutes Wow...

Everyone downvoting his post are thinking about what they want, rather than what is. There are literally millions of Flash games available on the web:ZombiePhysicsTypingRacingFPSAdventureMuiltiplayer gamesTower defenseGames that use your camera

The list goes on, and on, and on....

HTML5 gaming may be the future, but....it's the future. It's not here yet and has a long way to go. That being said, as experiments like this show, in the long run we'll be better off. But as with most things, I'm impatient, and want it NOW.

Okay, something that's possibly not clear (it wasn't to me). It wants you to tilt your phone to line up the dots at the lower right for calibration, and THEN if you want to have it move, you tilt in the direction -while holding down the power button- (Not your phone's power button, but the button on screen)

Okay, something that's possibly not clear (it wasn't to me). It wants you to tilt your phone to line up the dots at the lower right for calibration, and THEN if you want to have it move, you tilt in the direction -while holding down the power button- (Not your phone's power button, but the button on screen)

Yeah that was a bit confusing. I also pressed my phone's power button. I think they should have made the calibration widget front-and-center. But heck, it's just a tech demo.

One or more of my plugins seems to be preventing this. Oh well, it can only get better.

And for those saying "Flash can do this", yes it can - if you are prepared to enable Flash. Some of us look at the past and think "Why would we change this?". Google is obviously looking to the future and giving us a glimpse of what comes next.

There's a decent bit of input lag when using this method and the tilt sensitivity is a bit loose, but just being able to use a mobile phone to control a Web-based game in this way creates a pretty intense "wow, that's neat" moment.

Jeez. I guess that's the problem with the "web kiddies" nowadays: you're just too easily impressed.

Like someone else mentioned, I'm not looking forward to the "future" of gaming being 15 years behind the state-if-the-art. "It's coming... Any day now! For Real This Time(TM)"

Meanwhile, mobile games are doing just fine with native code, and pushing the boundaries.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.